Define your target

First of all, you have to define your target, which means that you have to know what you are going to write. So your target maybe a site containing general information, your personal page, a company presentation, an on-line service and so on. This is an important step, because if you have your target well defined, you won't have problems with submitting it to search engines, and you won't have problems with developing and updating pages afterwards. A little suggestion: drop a couple of lines listing subjects related to your site on a piece of paper.

Organize your information

Now you have to put subjects together. In other words you have to rank information and split them into categories. Each category has to contain similar information. During this stage, you have to think about your site as if you were writing a book. So you have to think about chapters, paragraphs and sections. But a book contains also an index and a summary, you could include them in your site. Ok, you got the hang of what your site will be and you can think about pages now.

Your pages

First of all: how many subjects I have to put inside of each page? Well, there isn't an unique answer, because you could put several subjects inside of one page or you can decide to write a page for each subject. However remember: you are writing a web page, so you have to care about the poor visitor who has to DOWNLOAD it! Well, he hasn't a powerful link-up via satellite: he has a poor 14.400 Kbps modem connection...For the same reason, you should choose your images carefully, because homepages with wonderful graphics are fantastic, but the poor visitor, as soon as he look at the browser's status bar telling: 'don't care, you have just 800 kbytes to download yet, and you have just received 1k at 30 bps...' well, he give up the tremendous undertaking. So I think you should avoid big jpg, say 100 kbyte of size. However during this stage you can think about main images and icons, buttons, your logo and so on. Besides, some pages have well defined features. In fact a page could contain a bibliography, a guestbook, some faqs, a bookmarks, a and so on. You could think about main links (previous, next, home and so on) but I think you should define the framework of your site first.

Tracing out the framework of the site

First of all you must have clear the meaning of an ambiguous term: homepage. Often people talk about their personal pages as they were homepages. Well, I think the term homepage means something else. An homepage is the main door of a site, that is its starting point. So usually a company's homepage contains its logo and starting links to visit the site. However let's talk about frameworks now. I think there are 4 main frameworks:

Hierarchical framework

Linear framework

Mixed framework

Reticular framework

If your site is a big and complex site, maybe you need some graph paper to trace the framework, otherwise you can use a simple sheet of paper. During this stage you can define homepage and main links. Here you can see how pages are connected each other. This is helpful to build the map of site.